


Whatever Can Happen

by Miss_M



Category: Interstellar (2014)
Genre: Canon Continuation, Dreams, Gen, Hope, Isolation, Loneliness, Memories, Misses Clause Challenge, New Planets, Relationship(s), Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-06 14:11:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5420027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You can’t help the existence of hope or the lack thereof. Hope is the last thing to die, right before we do. Hoping is different. It’s an action, it can become a permanent state, and it can kill you. Beware hoping, Dr. Brand.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whatever Can Happen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coffeesuperhero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeesuperhero/gifts).



> All mistakes are mine. I own nothing.

_Amelia dreams._

“Twenty-three years,” she whispers. She blinks, once, twice, to dam up the tears clouding her vision, turning Romilly into a gray-flecked blur. It’s herself she’s feeling sorry for, she will not insult him with her tears. “How did you manage on your own for so long?”

They are standing on the surface of Edmunds’ Planet, so Amelia would know this was a dream even if her life weren't passing in dreams ever since her arrival, one Earth month of wakefulness for every eleven of the long nap. 

Romilly’s smile is kind yet distant, as though he were smiling at a boulder far behind Amelia or a concept which is beyond her. “I learned to stop hoping. Hoping will kill you faster than any hull breach, any dietary imbalance or physical accident.”

Amelia thinks of her long walks around base camp on Edmunds’ Planet – she refuses to call it anything else, Earth 2 or anything, it’s inaccurate as well as too soon for her. It will always be too soon for her – and how she would try to make them last longer. She’d return to camp with her thigh muscles burning and the soles of her feet tingling, knowing what she would find: peace and quiet interrupted only by CASE moving around, taking care of preprogramed tasks, and the wind soughing over the rock formations and the gravel plains, which might once have been riverbeds. 

Romilly stopped hoping. Just like that.

“Yeah,” Amelia says.

Romilly’s raised forefinger is a distress beacon, impossible to ignore. “I didn’t say ‘hope.’ You can’t help the existence of hope or the lack thereof. Hope is the last thing to die, right before we do. Hoping is different. It’s an action, it can become a permanent state, and it can kill you. Beware hoping, Dr. Brand.”

*

_Amelia dreams._

“I’m sorry,” she screams, but Doyle doesn’t hear her, there’s something wrong with the transmitters in her helmet or the receivers in his. He’s too far away, the gravity is too much for her muscles and tendons and bones, Amelia is almost out of time. She is screaming now, sobbing inside the echo chamber of her helmet. The wave crests, breaks, breaks over Doyle and shatters him like a porcelain doll.

“I’m so sorry, Doyle. I thought I knew what the mission priority was. I’m so sorry.”

Amelia luxuriates in this dream of weeping. She is sorely lacking in other emotional input or outlets. 

*

Amelia was named after her grandmother, her father’s mother, at least that is the official version. She has always harbored a suspicion her father had a massive schoolboy crush on Amelia Earhart, a lone pioneer dead long before her father was even born.

 _We are the inheritors of the children we were, the children of people we never knew, the parents of generations which may never follow because we let them down too badly._

She knows her month of wakefulness is almost up when her thoughts begin to veer toward the morbid and the poetic. She smiles and shakes her head, refocuses on the task at hand: testing the seals on her habitat, running checks on the life-support on her cryopod, reviewing the accumulated environmental data of the previous eleven months, doing the exercises which retard muscle atrophy. 

The year on Edmunds’ Planet is slightly longer than the Earth average, as is the day-night cycle. Every time Amelia wakes, soaked and shivering and feeling like her bones have turned to lead, the light falls at a slightly different angle, the outside temperature varies just enough to let her know time keeps passing even if she’s not around to witness it. The universe has a momentum of its own, Amelia is the one who’s incidental.

She dreams about other people, her waking need for company transposed to the presence of others in her dreamscapes. Awake, she talks to people in her head almost continuously: her father, Cooper, Wolf, her mother, who died when Amelia was ten, even Murphy Cooper. 

Amelia refuses to speak to Dr. Mann. To hell with him.

She remembers Murphy from the message she sent about the other Dr. Brand’s passing, the sharp shock of Murphy’s anger and frustration with her own absent father. Amelia was the one who left her surviving parent behind, she cannot fully understand Murphy’s emotional state. Every person’s pain is their own. Amelia can only approximate, in her own head, Murphy’s isolation, her feeling of abandonment, her desperate longing for all the stars and one man among them. 

Amelia wonders if she and Murphy would have anything to say to each other, if they could meet in any waking world. All the years with her father that Murphy lost, Amelia gained without even wanting them. In return, Murphy gained the years by John Brand’s side, but Amelia won’t lie to herself that the two were substitutes for each other. She won’t allow herself the luxury of jealousy. She doesn’t deserve it. It’s nonsense anyway, and not even comforting nonsense. 

Being the sole human inhabitant of her corner of the universe doesn’t make Amelia feel as lonely as talking to people who aren’t there does. She always knew how to keep people at a distance, on their toes, alert and wary of her disdainful competence. She tries and fails to act defiant against memories, the phantoms crowding around her.

CASE is there, of course, he keeps the show running while Amelia sleeps, keeps her company when she wakes. Taciturn, cautious CASE, who puts Amelia’s welfare first. “I wouldn’t leave you behind, Dr. Brand,” he said before they went down to Miller’s Planet. While bonding – an instinctual, emotional process – is a gray area in sentient machines, it cannot be pure coincidence that CASE picked her of all the crew members, while garrulous, teasing TARS preferred Cooper. 

Amelia believes – she still believes – that love can transcend time and space. The notion that none of her human crewmates developed a crush on her despite her being the only woman for ten billion lightyears in any given direction, but a robot might develop a preference for one person over another, is hardly enough to boggle her. 

*

 _Amelia dreams._

She is with Wolf again, the night before he left on his mission. _No attachments_ had been everyone’s mantra, Amelia knew finding a new home for humanity trumped everything else. It still hurt that Wolf chose leaving, possibly for good, over her. 

Perhaps she is colder inside than she likes to admit, even to herself. When the time came, she bore leaving her father behind much more easily than she would have imagined. She knew the theory. Reality was different, easier. The heroic choice hurt less, in the end, than being hemmed in by wondering and never knowing, on a dying, crowded planet. 

In her dream, Amelia is happy. She is breathless, and she is warm, and Wolf is with her, beside her, so close to her. But she knows she is dreaming, because she is never alone in dreams. Spending one Earth month per Earth year awake is not long enough or continuous enough to grieve properly, so she keeps replaying these scant memories over and over again. 

She cannot begin to forget, yet in her dreams faces are beginning to blur, features wash out like the logo stamped on a bar of soap, the timbres of her loved ones’ voices no longer resonate. All she is left with are literary clichés. Amelia’s father loved to quote Dylan Thomas, and Amelia has her own mantras, leeched of all meaning but what she imbued them with long ago. 

_As I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep_ , she recites silently at the end of her every waking month. She doesn’t believe in God, certainly not an Earth God who sees her where she is, but she prays the words anyway. When she thinks about Wolf, it’s through the words of a Scottish poet who died soon after Amelia was born: _Into my life, larger than life, you strolled in…_ Her mind uses the memories she forged of other people as a shield against the black hole at her core.

_I’m still not convinced I’m going to make it, Cooper._

_Cooper?_

*

_Amelia wakes._

She is sitting on the edge of her cryopod, her feet hanging, as inert as paperweights, a foot above the floor. She is adjusting to gravity’s pull on her upright body and trembling the remains of the long nap off her damp skin, and she knows it is too soon. 

CASE drapes a blanket over her. “Good afternoon, Dr. Brand. I woke you ahead of schedule because a ship broke atmo approximately half a standard Earth hour ago.” 

CASE pauses just long enough that Amelia can process the information, but not forge ahead into confusion or denial. She can almost hear the smile in CASE’s voice when it decides she’s waited long enough. 

“TARS is hailing us. It’s them.”

Amelia doesn’t think. She wraps the blanket around herself, barely pauses to check the outside temperature – it’s the height of Edmunds’ Planet summer, a few degrees cooler than Iowa summers had been when the _Endurance_ left Earth – then she is out of the habitat. She stubs her toe on an oval stone she uses to prop up the habitat door on warm evenings, rushes in a stumbling crouch past Wolf’s grave, aiming for the vantage point where she planted the flag. Her clothes are dripping water down her legs. A puddle forms around her when she stops at last, leaning on the flagpole, and turns slowly clockwise, scanning the clear sky. 

She sees it, the ship’s wake like a comet tail in the southwest quadrant. 

Amelia waits. She saw where they landed, calculates that they will reach her faster than she could reach them. She’s shaky, barely able to focus on the food CASE brings her. She doesn’t trust herself to drive out to meet them. She doesn’t trust her senses or even CASE’s senses. She cannot deal with this change, her universe thrown off kilter, not after she has spent so long sleeping and going through the motions, even as her fingers twitch to hurry them along. 

She sits cross-legged on a warm, flat boulder, her clothes dry out in the dipping sun. The back of her neck starts to tingle with incipient sunburn, but she wouldn’t move for the world. For any world. 

_A giant sarcastic robot_ – Cooper’s description of TARS as they were leaving Earth orbit. The tall, square shape glints in the sun as it crests the hill to the southwest, still far enough away that Amelia can see its outline clearly, but not the green scroll of text on its screen or its acronym-name embossed on its front in bold capital letters. 

TARS pauses, moves its right-side extremity up and down. Then, when Amelia doesn’t react, it waves side to side.

The human shape which appears next to TARS is white, it reflects the sunlight. The second human and the second robot on Edmunds’ Planet. The head is dark, he’s taken off his helmet already, impetuous as ever. _That dogged son of a bitch_ , Amelia thinks, some of her old bravado flooding back, but still she sits motionless on her boulder. 

The man standing next to TARS raises his hand partway, pauses a moment, as though unsure she’s seen him or she’d want to see him, then his arm shoots up and Cooper waves wildly. The wind is blowing his voice the wrong way, but Amelia can just about hear his holler, a greeting and a demand to be recognized. 

Amelia’s eyes are too blurry to see more than white and dark and gleaming chrome. She stands up, the muscles in her legs protesting as she unfolds herself from where she sat in a patient half-lotus for what feel like centuries. Her voice sounds odd in her ears, a guttural, wordless rumble, she hasn’t heard it in so long. “Aww, look at that, TARS,” she imagines Cooper drawling, she can almost hear him already. “She _is_ happy to see us, after all.”

 _I was asleep. But then you came, and you woke me up._ That sounds like something she read once, she cannot remember where, a much-thumbed childhood copy of _Sleeping Beauty_ , or maybe she scrounged it together herself, from whatever mental resources she has left. 

Her blanket makes a puff of dust as it falls. She raises both arms high above her head. Screaming, laughing, weeping, Amelia waves back.

**Author's Note:**

> The Scottish poet Amelia quotes is Carol Ann Duffy, the poem is called [“You.”](http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/you)


End file.
